Dr. Zachary Rubin

There are a lot of what we call viral exanthems where you develop rashes naturally as your immune system is fighting off an infection.

So it can be difficult to truly verify whether it's an allergic reaction or not.

And even if it was, we estimate that most people with a true penicillin allergy outgrow it.

If you abstain from that medication for at least 10 years, the majority will lose that sensitivity over time and they get lost to follow up or there's difficult issues related to having physicians test this out because it's not always covered by insurance.

There's a lot of issues related to the resources that go into doing this type of testing.

And so this is something that many allergists are trying to figure out ways to streamline this process of de-labeling penicillin allergies on people's medical charts.

Because if you carry that label, you're at a higher risk of developing severe complications while you're in the hospital

longer hospitalization stays and even potentially higher mortality rates by having that label because you can't take a highly effective medication that has less side effects.

You end up having to take these different antibiotics that are more expensive, potentially more side effects and may not be as effective.

Now you hear it a lot.

Yes.

And when I was a kid, I had a milk allergy that I outgrew.

Um, and I knew one girl with a peanut allergy and that was it.

And, um,

part of that is recognition there are many accounts of people who would have what we would now consider a food allergy that it just was not talked about or recognized that actually has existed there's even documentation from the middle ages of dignitaries who had food allergies and potentially used it for political gain as a possibility of saying that somebody was trying to poison me but they likely had a food allergy the

These things did exist, but they were poorly understood.

And since the 1990s, not only has the recognition increased, but we have seen diagnosis of food allergies rapidly increase where the rates have more than tripled over the past 20 to 30 years.

And why would that be?

That is the billion dollar question.

So I'll give you some factors as to why this may be the case.